Day 2 of VMworld 2011 started with Dr Steve Herrod taking the stage for his keynote. In my opinion todays keynote was allot better than yesterdays in content.

So what did we learn? Yesterday I was left a little disappointed that we didn’t really learn anything new. Today put that right with some great announcements and demos.

VMware are trying to change the way they look at virtualised infrastructure and adopt a service and people centric approach. This came across when Steve mentioned focusing on the ‘services and not the servers’.

“Its all about the applications and the data”, I couldn’t agree more on this one. But what have VMware done over and above there existing portfolio?

View 5:

With View 5’sView Persona Management VMware are truly subscribing to addressing the user rather than the desktop.

The 3D graphics enablement take the virtual desktop even closer to the traditional PC.

Advancements made to the PCoIP protocol make the old complaints about the protocol much harder to justify.

For me the biggest and most long awaited from View (at least for me) is the UC integration. This apparently is much improved and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it to see how this really works.

Project ThinApp Factory:

Some changes to the way the app streaming (ThinApp) in the form of ‘Project ThinApp Factory’ in which a catalogue of apps is created.

Horizon:

Horizon application manager is a portal to access the apps. Thin app factory and horizon will be aligned (windows apps and mobile apps will be added to the horizon capabilities in the future) this will enable the ability to assign apps to users regardless of device.

Horizon mobile – separate device to your mobile – LG and now Samsung on horizon mobile but more to come. Gives IT more control over the handset device.

How do we get the data out of the desktops:

Project Octopus (click the link to register for the beta) – Offers a dropbox type service but internal to the company. Good security controls with AD integration. It can be provided through private and public cloud. This seems to fill an obvious business need that no large company has yet addressed.

Real world communications:

Socialcast (a recent VMware acquisition) could be a Cisco Quad competitor but I must confess it looked very good and would have may uses in any workplace.

Consuming Apps (Appblast):

Appblast can open windows applications without a VDI session. Appblast can open applications of any sort to any device that supports HTML5. This could be a potential game changer, the ability to open Microsoft Office apps (among many others) on devices like an iPad without having to launch a VDI session is going to be very powerful.

iPad vSphere Client Update:

A new vsphere ipad client was announced. This now supports doing vMotions and looked to be becoming a very powerful tool.

Talking a little bit more about vSphere:

“innovation is great but has to be accessible” – vSphere GO (is a web based admin tool, gives them a dummies admin portal) and VSA – VMware Storage Appliance (no HA, vmotion and DRS, very good for low end market using local drives).

Steve said he wants to make every application to work on vSphere instead of hearing the old ‘not all apps can be virtualised’.

VXLAN and others:

Networking – Virtual Extendable LAN (VXLAN) can layer 2 into layer 3 (Mac on IP). This can help significantly with cloud bursting in hybrid clouds.

Availability – SRM 5 Now has vSphere replication giveing the ability to replicate between different arrays agnostically arrays. SRM 5 can now do automated fail back. Interestingly vCloud partners are allowing disaster recover to the cloud. (could be a great use case for cloud in the first place for customers)

Its fair to say compared to my pervious experience with VMworld’s in Europe that Las Vegas 2011 is on a massive scale.

Being a blogger means I get an amazing seat for the keynote and facilities for the keynote speech from Paul Maritz. Its been a big year for VMware and I’m hoping that the excitement is not over just yet with maybe a new announcement or two.

Hopefully you you will get a summary of the main points from the keynote.

Its fair to say VMware have upped the game on their keynote promo vids this year. A very futuristic almost matrixy feel to it.

(pic of Paul on the big screen)

Labs overview:

pure public cloud lab model expecting over 200k VMs created.

World VMUG users now 60,000 strong

Some other interesting points:

VMworld 2012 is in San Fran Aug 27-30, for me this is great as I have heard nothing but good things about San Fran. Vegas is great though

More than half of all servers being deployed today are VMs. This is a big milestone in the Virtualisation world.

A new VM born every 6 seconds.

20 millions VMs currently running around the world.

At any point in time there are more VMs being vmotioned than planes in flight around the world.

There are over 68000 VCPs. Last I heard this was 30k so this is a big jump. It makes me a feel a little less special.

Unfolding the Cloud era:

“the next major round of integration between enterprise IT and consumer driven change”, “we will re-define IT over the coming decade”. Both very bold statements but I cant help but agree this is where IT is going. Working for a solutions provider I can see this at the cole face and while it is a little while away I think it is where things are going.

Billions of new users and devices coming into play, in 3 years less than 20% will be PCs and mainly dominated by other devices. 5 years ago this would have been a radical thought but with the consumer market changing the way they consume applications it makes a PC look archaic.

New programming frameworks and datafabrics are key to the future of cloud.

Invest in new and renewed applications. Stu Radnidge hit on this in a recent London VMUG and for me this is the biggest hurdle to cloud computing. Getting developers to change their mentality is difficult but shoots seem to be breaking though.

Existing client applications are going to be around for a long time, virtualisation enable this as it can be applied in a non disruptive way until the applications can be re-written to cloud optimised applications.

Automation to allow the operational efficiency will be the next step on from the Automation of hardware. Not automating operational functions means that cloud become a non starter.

In 2009 Paul announced 4.0, In 2010 he announced 4.1, 2011 he announced 5.0 – vSphere 5 needed an overlapping development effort. (1 million engineering hours, 2 million QA hours, 200 new features, 2000 partner certification)

New product lines – VMware essentials (Datacenter in a Box using the storage appliance) and VMware Go.

VMware go is SaaS services fegor SMB – 100ks of people taking it up. it helps the SMBs to get fully set up after a free vSphere hypervisors.

Knowing what the new generation of programmers are doing enables VMware to provide what they need. vFabric – in memory database (gemfabric), datadirector – vFabric postgress. (database optimisation that will help the database vendors).

After some uncertainty I have finally been able to pin down my trip to the US VMworld show.

This is my first ever US VMworld and I can’t wait. I have previously been to the last 2 VMworld Europe events and got a lot out of them. With the US show being first in line, so close to the Europe show and on a much bigger scale I am expecting to gain much more from the event.

This year also sees my first vExpert year, and along with the sessions, labs and solutions exchange I also have a ton of vExpert stuff to fit in. It’s fair to say my diary is completely packed.

I’m looking forward to the sessions I have signed up for as the subjects and speakers are should be amazing.

I’ll try to get along to as many tweetups etc as possible to try to meet as many people as I can that I know or follow virtually.